Build a Credential Hygiene Monitor for Small Teams

1. 1

   Do not build a password manager

   Say it out loud and mean it: the vault category is owned by incumbents with a decade of trust, security audits, and free tiers, and displacing them is not a solo builder's fight. The gap is monitoring and accountability around credentials, which the vaults themselves only partly cover and small businesses never configure.

2. 2

   Follow current guidance, not folklore

   NIST SP 800-63B discourages mandatory periodic password rotation and recommends changing credentials on evidence of compromise, so an aging-alerts product is selling outdated practice. Build alerts on what the evidence supports: breach exposure, reuse across services, missing multi-factor, and credentials that should have died with an offboarding.

3. 3

   Scan what you can reach legitimately

   Public breach corpuses queried by domain, workspace admin APIs (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) for two-factor status, dormant accounts, and forwarding rules, and an offboarding checklist that reconciles departed staff against active accounts. No credential harvesting, no gray-area scraping.

4. 4

   Deliver a monthly report a non-technical owner reads

   One page: what changed, who is exposed, three actions ranked by risk. The buyer is an office manager or owner, not a CISO; plain language and a fix-it checklist are the product as much as the scanning is.

5. 5

   Sell through the people already trusted with small-business IT

   Managed service providers, IT consultants, and cyber insurance brokers can bundle the monitor across their whole client base; white-label the report for them. Direct sales to five-person companies will not cover acquisition costs at this price point, so channel is the model.

6. 6

   Keep expectations modest and expand carefully

   This is a solid small product line, not a rocket: price per company per month in the low tens of dollars through channel partners. If it earns trust, adjacent hygiene checks (expiring domains and certificates, exposed cloud buckets) extend the same report without becoming a vault.

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